Felix Cantesanu - 2013/09/21 01:32:13 UTC
Baltimore
Crazy tuff happened! Glad Steve is OK, glider is gone but that's replaceable.
Apparently he was standing behind of his glider, the plane loses control, goes left off the runway and eventually turned on the tip and rammed Steve's glider with Steve behind it and all - the guys I talked to (Sunny, Adam, etc.) said they expected the worse when they saw it all happen but Steve seemed to be fine (got to talk with him a bit). He'll need surgery on the right ear (probably cut by a side wire) - hopefully not much more than that.
Someone that knows more please post...
Steve Kinsley - 2013/09/21 01:47:24 UTC
I actually don't know that much about what happened. I was kneeling down in front of the glider to put on the vario when I heard some engine noise. The engine noise got very loud in the space of a few seconds and I started to get up to see what it was. Then it was all impact stuff. I ended up on my back on the sail. I realized my ear was bleeding pretty badly and then Bob was there helping me up. Pretty bizarre. Not sure if it was my luck day (I could have easily been killed) or just wasn't my day.
Damn. I didn't know that was Steve. If they're gonna crash planes on gliders and owners at Ridgely I wish they'd do it on somebody really deserving (just about anyone else) and the consequences would be a whole lot more permanent.
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2013/10/11 23:06:00 UTC
Been thinking for a while about establishing a topic to handle items of possible interest that don't necessarily have anything to do with the primary mission of Kite Strings - which is to reform hang gliding from "expert" opinion to reality based aviation.
The incident with Steve didn't fit in anywhere else and seemed as good a kickoff point as any.
AMAZING story behind what's going on in those two paintings. "A Higher Call" - heard the author on a radio interview at the end of last year - on the seventieth anniversary of the incident - and later went cover to cover. Highly recommend.
I spend a lotta time on the keyboard (big surprise) - overwhelmingly wordprocessing - and I've always been heavily dependent upon macros since scoring my first Mac (PowerBook 180) twenty years ago. (If I'd had a better functioning brain I'd have done something like that thirty years ago.)
Tend to get set in my ways and shy of advancing technology and was getting painted into corners with my approaches. Monday I got adventurous and installed an application I thought might do the sort of thing I wanted and have been trying to kick myself in the ass ever since (like I've been wanting to kick myself in the ass for not having switched to he Dvorak keyboard layout at the first opportunity).
Typinator from Ergonis. Real user friendly, easy, does everything I've always wanted and much more.
For example, take some fun quote from some idiot like Ryan...
"instant hands free release"
Enter it, code it "ihfr" or, better yet I just realized, "ih" (or whatever the hell you want and can remember) and when you type your sequence in any application you want as a stand-alone the expander kicks in.
The only thing in English which starts with "ih" is a pancake house and you can do case sensitive so that it doesn't kick in. And it won't kick in after the beginning of word so you're OK with "likelihood".
I'm not endorsing Typinator over other expander apps 'cause I didn't take the trouble to look at them and this one's Mac only but there's comparable stuff for Windows. If you spend more than five minutes a weak on a keyboard it's stupid to not have something like this. Cheap, no downsides.
I'm now pretty wired to spotting bullshit in incident reports and cover-up campaigns now and was just thinking about the recent Cincinnati atrocity.
This belligerent Ray Tensing asshole was using the justification that he was being dragged for shooting dangerous non front license plate driver Samuel DuBose in the head. (He's somehow able to draw his gun and fire a killing shot but not able to disentangle himself from the car. (Yeah, been there, done that.))
Shooting this guy in the head DID NOT stop the car from rolling. Almost certainly made it go faster. It crashed to a stop after running off the road at the end of the block. And it didn't do anything to help Tensing disentangle himself. How odd that he wasn't dragged until the car crashed to its stop.
Just checked online and saw the slowed down and stop-framed video which clearly reveals this story to be a total load o' shit but what the hell...
Hang gliding ain't the only asshole magnet in town. But... maybe he gets a point or two for not swallowing the card. Too smart or too stupid... Can't really say.
